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To OEM or not, that is the question

Rick was the CEO of a startup. His company had a very promising product. He was selling to enterprises (B2B product) for which he needed every helping hand he could get. In November of 2015, he got an opportunity to be an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) for a much larger company (Company A). He was very excited at the prospect. After all, this prospect would bring him additional 40,000 sales people from the new company, and had all the global customers he would not have been able to reach on his own.

But this also meant ensuing troubles that cost him a lot of time/money/resources. Was it worth it, you may ask ? Troubles started right on Day 1:

Building a business case : It took him several meetings and a few months of scheduling/re-scheduling to accommodate calendars of the people (Product Managers, Directors) at company A. Once they approved of the product, a business case needed to be built for General Manager and other executives of company A. Not only he had to submit the technical/marketing collateral to build such a case but had to support the entire team by answering questions around business, market, customers, legal, technical support, competition whenever he was asked for it. A lot of work as a pre-requisite to the actual OEM !

Margins, Profits, and SKUs: He had to compromise at a 70-30 share. Of any deal Company A would keep 70% and he would get only 30% of the deal. Still, a good deal, he thought. But when he worked out the numbers, he would not make much unless they did around 8 deals (with some combination of small, medium and large-sized deals) per year together. Company A had a 2-month long SKU creation process. That means, he had to wait for 2-months just for his product was available in the ordering catalog of company A. Not a big deal he thought, as he was planning to use this time to get some deals.

Selling, selling and selling: Over the next few months, many prospects came. Whenever they came, Rick’s team was asked to chip in for every meeting explaining the product, traveling to customers’ site for joint presentations, filling in RFPs/RFQs, submit new collateral as needed, develop additional use cases and related collateral. The demands from company A were endless. The prospects stood tall and were progressing step-by-step in the sales funnel, but none of them converted for months.

And a win after all! : Finally after 18 months of the processes and selling spiral, he got a win. The winning deal had his product with another company’s product, product revenues split 15-15 between them and Rick ended with a mere $1.2 million for the deal.

By this time he had 70% of his team working for this company, he had lost focus on other customers, his sales people had churned out, he had almost run out of money, most of his development and support staff was supporting the only customer that came from Company A. It was also harder to pull out of this deal due to the legal complexities.